Prisoners of Freedom - Sample Chapter

A Malawian human rights activist resisted my interest in the national lan-guage of his country by asking a sarcastic question. “Where will you gowith it?” (mupita nacho kuti?), he asked, using Chichewa for the Wrst timeduring our conversation, rather than English, Malawi’s oYcial language.The activist saw little value in a foreigner’s eVorts to master a languagethat was, in his view, conWned to a small and predominantly poor popu-lation. Whereas English opened out a world of opportunities, Chichewaappeared to close it. It seemed natural for foreigners and educatedMalawians to converse in the language of opportunities rather than thelanguage of deprivation.

That many other Malawians, including human rights activists, greetedmy interest in Chichewa with mirth rather than sarcasm is beside thepoint. Virtually all Malawians who considered themselves educatedregarded a Chichewa-speaking white man as an exotic curiosity, especiallyanomalous because he was not in Malawi to spread the gospel. Humanrights activists working for non-governmental organizations and projectswere accustomed to receiving white visitors who, whether as expatriateaid administrators or Xy-by-night consultants, rarely proceeded beyondbasic greetings in their study of Chichewa. These visitors’ relations withMalawians who did not speak English, the vast majority of the popula-tion, were never direct. In this regard, a white person (mzungu) speakingChichewa did have unusually extensive opportunities, if only for unmedi-ated interaction in the local context. Before his sarcastic question, theactivist had attempted to convince me that “Malawian culture” was to

25

C h a p t e r 1

The Situation of Human RightsDebating Governance and Freedom

UC_Englund.qxd 2/22/2006 9:41 AM Page 25

Copyrighted Material

blame for the apparently slow pace with which Malawians used the newtalk about human rights to make claims. Culture told them to “suVer insilence.” But if this mzungu could actually hear the claims that were madein Chichewa, would he consider them silenced by culture or by activiststhemselves? If he had no need to be chaperoned by activists, what wouldhe witness in villages and townships?

The notion of human rights depends on universalism in order to haveany meaning at all. Much as this statement obliterates sterile debates withcultural relativists, it is only the beginning for other theoretical andpolitical quandaries. For instance, if universals are made through trans-lation (Butler 2000), Chichewa and other indigenous languages have lit-tle to oVer, according to some Malawian activists. As the language of uni-versalism, English appears as the sole source of a new discourse (seechapters 2 and 3). This approach to translation informs the making ofMalawian activists as particular kinds of subjects, distinct from thosewhom they imagine as the beneWciaries of their eVorts. The process maybe peculiar to some African postcolonies, but certain aspects of these per-spectives have also impeded human rights universalism more generally.Too often have the exhortations of universalism been accompanied byequally vehement assertions of the particular origins of the concept. Onerecent example is in the conWdent attempt of Micheline Ishay (2004) toprovide the history of human rights. Underlying its laudable commitmentto universalism is a troubling particularism. One of this history’s “mostconsequential realities,” we are told, is that “the inXuence of the West,including the inXuence of the Western concept of universal rights, . . . hasprevailed” (Ishay 2004, 7). The assertion builds on exclusion as the cor-nerstone of a certain kind of universalism. Not only does the assertionabout origins exclude those scholars of human rights who feel no alle-giance to the West; it also fails to explain how a universal notion can bethe prerogative of one particular civilization.1

This book subscribes to the view that universals emerge through fric-tion, a relational condition for which translation is only one possiblemetaphor. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005) has written about “engageduniversals,” suggesting that universality in the abstract remains a chimera.Sensitivity to context should no longer be mistaken for particularism,whether as a simple opposite of universalism or as an espousal of a par-ticular civilization. Engaged universals never actually take over the world;their universalism is situational. This perspective Wnds further philo-sophical justiWcation in the thought of Alain Badiou (2001), who hasinsisted on considering situations in which human rights are evoked as

26 T H E S I T UAT I O N O F H U M A N R I G H TS



ineluctably political. This chapter must, therefore, also examine theassumption that human rights discourse contributes to governance in itstransnational and subjective modalities.

Varieties of Rights and CitizenshipI write in a cultural context in which positive values attached to individ-ual freedoms are so ingrained that some may consider ethnographicinsights from another context inconceivable or morally repugnant. As apreliminary step, it is important to note that this book seeks to achievemore than a simple inversion of priorities in discourse on human rights.To promote economic and social rights as if they took precedence overcivil and political liberties would be to make the same mistaken assump-tion that many human rights activists in Malawi made during the Wrst tenyears of democratization—the assumption of a hierarchy or generationof rights.2 Civil and political rights are not realized in full as long as socialand economic rights remain rudimentary. Conversely, and against manyof the “founding fathers” of independent Africa, socioeconomic devel-opment is not a more urgent matter than the establishment of civil andpolitical rights. Rather than deciding which set of rights should comeWrst, we should replace abstract considerations with empirical investiga-tions into the actual situations of rights and wrongs. Issa Shivji’s state-ment, formulated before the recent wave of democratization in Africa, isas cogent at present as when it was written: “[H]uman rights-talk shouldbe historically situated and socially speciWc. . . . Any debate conducted onthe level of moral absolutes or universal humanity is not only fruitless butideologically subversive of the interests of the African masses” (1989, 69).

While it may be unwarranted to assume a hierarchy of rights, thediVerent scope of diVerent rights challenges the view that human rightsare Wrst and foremost individual freedoms. Talal Asad (2003, 130) hasdrawn attention to a basic grouping of rights in political philosophy. Inthis dualistic scheme, rights that are intrinsic to the individual irrespec-tive of social relationships contrast with rights that entail and are entailedby obligations toward other people. The distinction is, however, ratherinconsequential as it stands, as evidence from Malawi and Zambia willdemonstrate (see especially chapter 2). Obligations can be envisaged asindividualistically as freedoms, and the critical issue is the extent towhich rights discourses enable subjects to claim entitlements. The idea ofentitlement presupposes membership in political society, institutional

T H E S I T UAT I O N O F H U M A N R I G H TS 27



arrangements that ensure historically speciWc standards of life. Thesearrangements have conventionally been the responsibilities of the state,but the predicament of many African postcolonies, as is discussed below,demands analysis of the transnational conditions of state formation. Forthe moment, more needs to be said about citizenship as the basis forrights as entitlements.3

As soon as citizenship becomes the focus of struggles over rights, themeaning of “human” in human rights begins to look less certain. The par-adox, as Asad (2003, 129) has pointed out, is that while human rights areinstrinsic to all persons irrespective of their cultural or political aYliations,the realization and protection of these rights depend on judicial institu-tions belonging to nation-states and international organizations. Mem-bership as civil status appears, therefore, more crucial than bare human-ity; presocial individuals are replaced by political subjects. It is in thissense that Shivji, as quoted above, warned against adopting “universalhumanity” (1989, 69) as the rallying cry for human rights discourse inAfrica. Yet it is not clear, in turn, whether this warning should itself betaken as universally valid. In his discussion of how ideas of humanity havevariously informed struggles over rights, Asad (2003, 141–148) recalls thecivil rights movement in the United States. Particularly revealing is thefrustration that Malcolm X expressed over a political project that re-mained conWned to the jurisdiction of the American state. The issue forhim was to transcend a discourse on civil rights by appealing to humanrights. A whole new world of possibilities would open out: “You can takeUncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it is thelevel of human rights. Civil-rights keeps you under his restrictions, underhis jurisdiction” (quoted in Asad 2003, 141–142).

The transnational dimensions of governance in postcolonial Africamay lend relevance to analogous concerns over rights debates that areconWned to national jurisdictions. At the same time, the human rights thatthose concerns evoke gain meaning within situational arguments aboutmembership in political society, not through arguments that depend onthe concept of abstract humanity.4 There is every reason to imagine thispolitical society as a transnational or worldwide society (Ferguson 2002).At any rate, whatever the scale of society in which persons can claim mem-bership, it is important to recognize as much variation in the types of cit-izenship as in the notions of rights. In a classic discussion, T. H. Marshall([1950] 1977) identiWed political, civil, and socioeconomic elements in cit-izenship. His particular concern was the exclusion of the working class inpostwar Britain from social rights to the kinds of education, health care,




and social security that would have generated a shared sense of equalcitizenship.

More recent theorists of citizenship have insisted that exclusion is notonly a consequence of material deprivation, but it can also occur from alack of recognition for cultural citizenship (Kymlicka 1995). One moredimension has thus been added to Marshall’s typology of citizenship, withthose countries in mind in which the presence of immigrants and otherminority groups has come to challenge discriminatory deWnitions of cit-izenship. This “multiculturalist” challenge has, however, been ill servedby those studies that have deployed a notion of discrete cultures con-fronting one another within the same society (see, e.g., Parekh 2000;Tully 1995). The contrast to current anthropological explorations of cul-tural citizenship is sharp. Anthropologists investigate how culturallydeWned subjects are constructed within the speciWc political and economicconjunctures of ostensibly liberal societies (see, e.g., ComaroV andComaroV 2004; Povinelli 2003). These anthropological studies, in otherwords, take as problematic what some multiculturalists have taken forgranted. Far from arising from primordial identities, cultural citizenshipmay be constrained and molded by the very operations of state-sponsoredrecognition its proponents demand.

The frequent reference to “liberalism” in some of these critiques alsopresents an opportunity to specify the contemporary political and eco-nomic conditions of many emerging democracies in Africa and beyond.Liberalism encompasses such a complex legacy of thought and practicethat it can be a misnomer for what has informed state policies and foreignaid since the Cold War (see Kelly 2005). Neoliberalism appears to be amore proper description, acknowledging historical resonances with someaspects of liberalism while revealing a distinctively contemporary predica-ment. Of particular relevance to a discussion of citizenship is the way inwhich political subjectivity is envisaged under the neoliberal regime. It isa subjectivity that seems congenial to the assertion of “the uncompro-mising autonomy of the individual, rights-bearing, physically discrete,monied, market-driven, materially inviolate human subject” (J. L.ComaroV and J. ComaroV 1999, 3). At the same time when multiculturalcitizenship was contemplated in some European and North Americancontexts, many emerging democracies in Africa were built on the assump-tion that citizens are individuals.5 The assumption supported neoliberalreform in national economies, with privatization, for example, creatingthe conditions for bringing to fruition the individual’s entrepreneurialessence. That human rights came to be deWned in a particular way did not




surprise critics, as Asad, among others, noted: “The historical conver-gence between human rights and neoliberalism may not be purely acci-dental” (2003, 157).

Citizenship was, in other words, largely one-dimensional, a passportto political rights at the expense of socioeconomic justice. Hence, also, theemphasis on developments in the narrowly deWned political sphere, espe-cially in the realm of electoral competition, in much academic and policy-oriented discussion on these new democracies (for a critique, see Caldeiraand Holston 1999). Yet precisely because the regime is best described asneoliberal, alternatives to it can be sought both in the more radicalstrands of liberalism and in the actual situations uncovered by ethnogra-phy. To be sure, democratic proceduralism, giving special weight to theconstitutional distribution of political and civil rights, has been handeddown from liberalism’s foundational Wgures, such as Immanuel Kant(Kelly 2005, 29). Alongside, and perhaps increasingly against, one-dimen-sional citizenship stand the intellectual and political legacies of civil andsocioeconomic citizenship and entitlements, as indicated above. More-over, despite their compatibility with the neoliberal regime, certain inter-ventions can also be reclaimed for potentially transformative projects. Therhetoric of participation has been eagerly repeated by human rightsactivists in Malawi as elsewhere (chapter 4), but the allocation of respon-sibility to abstract individuals and resource-poor communities has donelittle to address neoliberal injustices. As has recently been argued, how-ever, the idea of participation is not intrinsically tied to the neoliberalorder it may serve (Hickey and Mohan 2005). Much hinges on what kindof citizenship informs participatory projects—it is possible to envisageother dimensions of citizenship that address the situations of marginal-ized and subordinate persons.

In a similar vein, civil citizenship, while only superWcially promoted bysome human rights agencies, is crucial to the realization of political andsocioeconomic citizenships. Violence and insecurity have been the Xipside of new democracies where civil citizenship has had little impactbeyond legislative reforms. The popular experience in Malawi has beenstrikingly similar to the one in Brazil, where elite citizens have respondedto insecurity by criminalizing the poor (Caldeira and Holston 1999,699). Chapter 7 describes how insecurity and violence in Malawi’s impov-erished townships led to a moral panic that was criminalized as “mob jus-tice” by both the police and human rights activists. The extent to whichthis incident was triggered by a lack of civil citizenship, deWned as it wasthrough an individualistic notion of freedoms, was rendered unthinkable.




“Rights-based development” (see, e.g., DFID 2000) presents onemore example of how current interventions can have contradictory con-sequences depending on the interests they are made to serve. Critics, suchas Mark DuYeld (2001, 221–224), have been quick to point out that thisdevelopment’s apparent commitment to social and economic rights cantranslate into yet another depoliticized humanitarian eVort to satisfysocial and economic needs. By contrast, the case from Malawi, discussedin chapter 8, shows how the transformative potential of rights-baseddevelopment was too much for the Malawian and British governments tobear, resulting in the project’s closure even before it was oYciallylaunched. Intriguing in this case is that it would have oVered resources forMalawians to claim their rights as entitlements rather than as individualfreedoms. The status quo prevailed, and two alternative forms of citi-zenship and rights remained alien to the new democracy (Kymlicka2002, 327). On the one hand, civil virtues and active political participationwere deemphasized, if not discouraged altogether. On the other hand,group-diVerentiated rights, uniting claimants as a collective force, werenipped in the bud by associating them with pathological and dangerousideas, such as regionalism and tribalism.6 These reXections suggest thatthe necessary task of critique is not advanced if it merely attacks conceptsand procedures that the neoliberal moment has made fashionable.Throughout this book, the critical focus is on the making and conduct ofsubjects who put those concepts to speciWc uses. The focus, in short, is onthe situational character of human rights and citizenship.

Situating Universal RightsThe situation of human rights, it was claimed above, is invariably politi-cal. Much of this book is concerned with showing how various partici-pants in human rights discourse, deliberately or not, depoliticize the situ-ation of human rights. Yet as some critics of the post–Cold War wave ofdemocratization have argued, there was no lack of politics in emergingdemocracies (see Abrahamsen 2000; Caldeira and Holston 1999).Political citizenship, as was mentioned above, became a major preoccu-pation all over the world. Busying themselves with issues such as regimechange and electoral competition, analysts and activists were often slowto assess whether political reforms, including the introduction of humanrights discourse, brought legitimacy and eYcacy to the ways in whichthese countries were governed. At the same time, analysts and activists




might have been excused for thinking that they were merely being loyalto popular priorities. In Malawi, talk about politics became the nation’sfavorite pastime, with a handful of political leaders providing entertain-ing, if sometimes controversial, topics for conversation after many yearsof great circumspection about political life. President Muluzi oftenlamented, especially toward the end of his regime, that wherever two ormore Malawians met, they started to talk politics.

Muluzi’s lament was, of course, a thinly veiled attempt to discouragepopular debate on his regime’s intrigues. To this extent, talk about poli-tics could be consequential, and a human rights project that studiouslyavoided such talk contributed to depoliticization in a rather literal sense(chapters 3 and 4). It is, however, precisely these ostensibly nonpoliticalagencies that make the actual scope of the political extend far beyondpolitical institutions and politicians themselves. At issue is the constitu-tion of power whose structures and processes are not reducible to thedomain of political science. The cultural disposition of elitism is a his-torically constituted way of legitimizing and exercising power in Malawi.As is discussed further in this chapter, it introduces both subjective andtransnational modalities to the study of governance.

A key procedure by which human rights discourse in Malawi and else-where has depoliticized the exercise of power is the denial that humanrights acquire signiWcance situationally. The procedure is familiar from awide range of contemporary contexts and is one that, according to theFrench philosopher Alain Badiou (2001, 9), posits a universal human sub-ject who is split into two modalities. On the one hand, the subject is pas-sive and pathetic, the one who suVers. On the other, the subject is active,the one who identiWes suVering and knows how to act. Note the ease withwhich such a procedure articulates with one historical legacy of elitism inMalawi—the association of knowledge with elites and those who mimictheir ways. The education of the poor and the ignorant has long been anaspect of liberal democracy (Asad 2003, 61), pregnant with historical par-allels with missionary and colonial projects in many African settings. Thesituation of human rights is political because the decision over abstracthumanity always precedes any actual claim or grievance. This decisionholds, in eVect, some protagonists in contempt by precluding participa-tion in deWning the universal in their situation. Badiou has emphasized thetransnational and racial underpinnings of this procedure: “On the side ofthe victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the sideof the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And whydoes this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who




cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides,behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man?” (2001, 12–13).

Malawian activists’ admiration for formal education, which involvesthe uncritical acceptance of English as the language of power and con-tempt for those whose skills in literacy are limited, is an instance of thissplit subjectivity in an African postcolony. What Badiou calls “the singu-larity of situations” (2001, 14) and “the real of situations” (2001, 7) aresacriWced to abstraction. Badiou’s (2001, 14–15) analogy comes from themedical domain. Just as a human rights activist conceives of victims as anindistinct crowd, so too does a medical doctor following a bureaucraticprocedure forget the singularity of the medical situation and see herpatients as “the sick,” anonymous statistical entities. Badiou’s assault is onthe proliferation of a certain ethical discourse that has brought to themedical situation concerns that are radically exterior to it, such as health-care expenses and managerial responsibilities. The result can be a lack ofcare for bureaucratic and political reasons, for instance when the patientis an illegal immigrant.

Analogies aside, thinking across domains gives little guidance as tohow to deWne a situation. It may be the philosopher’s privilege to createan impression that human rights discourse is incorrigibly inimical to theinterests of the poor.7 By contrast, those who actually study “the real ofsituations” often need to include within it contests over the very idea ofhuman rights. On the one hand, aspects of the discourse as promoted byactivists and their foreign benefactors do Wnd their way into popularvocabularies, although the interests they are made to serve can be incom-patible. On the other hand, incompatibilities can be even more radical,beginning with the inability of some activists to accept certain grievancesand practices as belonging to the domain of human rights (chapters 6 and7). Neither of these observations undermines Badiou’s insight that humanrights discourse tends to bury actual contests and incompatibilities underthe abstraction of universal subjectivity. The observations, moreover, lendsupport to a critique of the expectation that rational debate in the publicsphere could alone resolve even the sharpest of these contradictions(Calhoun 1992). A fundamental problem is subjects’ uneven capacity tobe heard in a human rights discourse that delineates the public sphere lessas a realm of rational deliberation than as a site of power (Asad 2003, 184).At the same time, and as Badiou’s philosophical critique entails, even ifsome subjects are assigned the status of victims, their engagement withthe situation bespeaks a far more active disposition. Notions of resistanceand agency have little to oVer here, linked as they often are to social sci-





entists’ “easy populism” (Brennan 1997, 65) that forgets the real of situa-tions in which diVerent subjects enter the debate on human rights.Rather, engagement compels a reconsideration of what freedom might beonce it is recovered from its individualistic connotations in a particularhuman rights discourse (see below).

Engagement also represents the source of universals in the situation ofhuman rights. The universalism of victimhood and those who claim toknow how it is deWned gives way to engaged universals (Tsing 2005). It isthrough contingent collaborations that incompatible interests and dispo-sitions can turn into compatible ones, moments of shared vision and hope.As universals, human rights concepts must satisfy two conditions. The Wrstis the conventional expectation that they travel across the situations inwhich they are evoked. The second is the more contentious requirementthat they come to operate as universals within a situation. Even thoughThe second condition Wnds relatively little support in the ethnography ofhuman rights discourse in Malawi, this by no means entails pure victim-hood or a lack of engagement. If anything, disengagement has beenactivists’ mode of undermining the universalist promise of human rights.8

By describing how other Malawians actually have engaged with the situ-ation of human rights, this book may be read to suggest possibilities forcollaboration and coalitions. However, because the situation of humanrights is political, more is needed than improved translation betweenactivists and their impoverished partners in villages and townships. The sit-uation is an instance of governance, not rational debate.

Transnational Governance and Neoliberal GovernmentalityThe concept of governance would hardly feature in an ethnography ofhuman rights discourse if it did not, somewhat paradoxically, extend ourpurview beyond the workings of national governments. Such an exten-sion was not envisaged by those who Wrst introduced the notion in pol-icy and academic debates on the post–Cold War world. Good governancewas the business of good governments. “Governance” signaled a renewedinterest in engineering state institutions to manage the assumed economicand developmental consequences of neoliberal reforms. When the WorldBank, for example, deWned governance as “the manner in which power isexercised in the management of the economic and social resources fordevelopment” (1993, 2), it was clear that at issue was the power of polit-ical and bureaucratic agents in a nation-state.




Despite intensifying doubts over such limiting notions of power andgovernance, as discussed in this chapter, the focus on state institutionshas remained an item of faith among inXuential thinkers. An obviousexample is the recent attempt of Francis Fukuyama (2004) to highlightthe importance of rebuilding institutions in “failing states,” an ideolog-ical program that is thought to safeguard the entire world order. Similarassumptions are evident even when authors’ sense of complexity sur-passes Fukuyama’s policy-oriented panacea. The study of Africa’s Xedg-ling democracies, for instance, is said to beneWt from a subtle notion of“governance quality,” a means to diVerentiate governments according totheir success in institutionalizing developmental procedures and values(see, e.g., Alence 2004). The world thus envisaged may well be inter-connected, composed of myriad political and economic forces, but it alsolends itself to a view of governance as mutually independent govern-ments’ prerogative.

The search for a more plausible notion of governance must be mind-ful of especially two aspects of state-centered and institutional perspec-tives. The Wrst informs Fukuyama’s (2004) caution against an unvar-nished belief in the benevolence of the market. His focus on stateinstitutions comes as a reWnement of the neoliberal credo that, from atleast the 1980s onward, promoted the free market economy as the solu-tion to virtually every conceivable problem in society. The tyranny of themarket, so abhorrent to neoliberalism’s critics (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1998;Chomsky 1998), troubles some of neoliberalism’s apologists too. As ameans to enhance good governance, the institutions of liberal democracyare thought to ensure development, if only for the beneWt of the market.This is linked to the second preoccupation of institutional neoliberalism.“Failing states” are an anathema to a world order in which the interestsof Western economic and political predominance are increasingly gaugedin terms of security. Popular discontent breeds protest, which may, in theabsence of deliberate institutional reforms toward liberal democracy,jeopardize the security of rich nations. When institutional reforms arethought to ensure participation and partnership in this world order, thecommitment of the discourse to the status quo is unmistakable.

In point of fact, Fukuyama joins a long lineage of concerned policymakers and intellectuals who have seen in impoverishment a hauntingpossibility of insurrection. This concern is at least as old as the notion ofinternational development itself, with the Truman Doctrine of 1947, forexample, arguing that the suVering of the poor was “a handicap and athreat to both them and the more prosperous areas” (quoted in Escobar1995, 3).9 Interventions by rich nations appear legitimate when the



avowed objective is to assist poor nations in democratic state building.Current institutional perspectives, calling for measures to curb theexcesses of neoliberalism, assert the natural order of things in whichnation-states carry the primary responsibility for their citizens’ well-being. Critical responses to this false naturalism had been publicized evenbefore neoliberalism assumed its present predominance. By the 1960s, theroots of “underdevelopment” had been located in the unequal exchangebetween rich and poor countries (e.g., Amin 1976; Frank 1969). Morerecent perspectives have emphasized not only nations as “imagined com-munities” (Anderson 1983) but also the imaginative and symbolic workthat makes states seem the ultimate repositories of power and authority(see, e.g., Malkki 1992; Scott 1998; Taussig 1996).

The critical issue here is, on the one hand, that governance, paceFukuyama and other institutionalists, is by no means the prerogative ofgovernments. Governance takes place in a transnational context of non-governmental organizations and multilateral and Wnancial institutions,perhaps even more so during the neoliberal era, when some state func-tions have been increasingly delegated to nonstate agencies.10 Few woulddispute the continuing salience of states in the world; the challenge is toaccount for this salience without merely repeating commonsensical ideasof the state as the most encompassing element in governance (Fergusonand Gupta 2002). On the other hand, if the exercise of state power hasalways depended no less on symbolic than on bureaucratic procedures—if indeed the symbolic and the bureaucratic are two sides of the samecoin—the task is to discern the symbolic and subjective eYcacy of gov-ernance under neoliberalism. As this book shows for Malawi, diverseagencies, often seen to be antagonistic toward one another, contributedto the undemocratic governance of an African country by entering intoa tacit agreement over the scope of human rights. How can this instanceof neoliberal governance be demonstrated ethnographically?

“Governmentality,” a neologism Wrst introduced by Michel Foucault ina lecture in 1978 (see Foucault 1991), oVers one set of ideas for such a proj-ect, although, as is discussed below, important caveats must also be ob-served. Exploring government from a broad philosophical and historicalperspective, Foucault extended the notion beyond its modern conWnes ofstate institutions. He argued that a shift from a Machiavellian emphasison territory occurred to produce a population as the target of govern-ment, with territory and property as mere variables in “the general formof management” (Foucault 1991, 94). Foucault’s innovation was to depictthe practices of government in the plural and to locate them even in the




most intimate realms of family, let alone in such domains as education,religion, and the law. “Governmentality” thus refers to “the conduct ofconduct,” the acts and norms of governing from state institutions to a plu-rality of agencies and authorities, to aspects of personal behavior governedas much by self-regulation as by these authorities (Dean 1999). Whatappears to make governmentality conducive to ethnographic research isthe manner in which it brings faceless institutions and active subjectswithin the same purview. The problem of subjectivity is at the core of gov-ernmentality, arising from people’s continuing capacity to think and actwhen governed by others (see Burchell 1991).

The great interest of governmentality as a notion is the possibility itopens out to examine how people, including those with no formalinvolvement in the political system, participate in governing both them-selves and others. This book shows how a particular translation of humanrights came to represent individual freedoms as the natural grounds formaking claims. In addition to the political history described in the intro-duction, the allure of deWning human rights as individual freedoms lay inits apparently postcolonial approach to governance. Rights-bearing sub-jects were free to take up the burdens of governing and developingthemselves. Yet precisely because the vast majority of subjects were givenlittle else than abstract notions to work with, the establishment of ahuman rights regime appeared perpetually unWnished. The assumed rea-son was the low level of understanding among the poor, calling for moreinculcation of the abstract notions. The involvement of activists anddonors thus persisted, their status as vanguards asserted over and again.

Discourse on human rights was, therefore, instrumental in govern-mentality, and its eYcacy rested as much on external donor agencies’Wnancial support as on activists’ own eVorts to mold the behavior of notonly authorities but the population at large. At the same time, much asactivists and state authorities appeared to be at loggerheads, their ap-proach to governing the populace shared remarkable aYnities. Govern-mentality built on the cultural disposition of elitism, understood here inhistorical terms. The subsequent chapters will describe how notions ofself-esteem, personal hygiene, linguistic habits, and modes of dressshaped self-regulation among youthful activists who themselves hardlybelonged to the national elite.

Yet it is precisely because of history that the notion of governmental-ity cannot be applied without important caveats. The making of self-regulating subjects builds on objectiWcation as much as on subjectiWca-tion. The status of “the grassroots” as the ignorant recipients of others’





wisdom resonated with the coercion and control that colonialism hadperiodically asserted as its main methods of governance. Historical par-allels are also apparent in contest and contradiction, with the narrowdeWnition of human rights only partly successful in erasing the actual vari-ety of making claims. The notion of governmentality may, after all, pro-vide rather limited insights into this variety in the situation of humanrights. Ethnographic knowledge, based on Weldwork, complicates theinexorable schemes that Foucauldian theorizing, at least in its unvarnishedforms, conjures up.

Beyond Foucault’s PrisonA major theoretical advance is involved when an analytical vocabulary per-mits the description of governance in its subjective and transnationalmodalities, reaching beyond institutionalist perspectives. At the sametime, the notion of governmentality may prove to be too persuasive in itsreinvention of functionalism, a totalizing explanatory framework inwhich everything Wts, including contradictions. As soon as neoliberalism’sapologists had celebrated new freedoms, critics inspired by the notion ofgovernmentality enthusiastically exposed new operations of power. Tsingis sardonic about the “mirror opposite” that some of these critiques haveprovided: “Non-governmental organizations, human rights advocacy,and civil society spread as a transnational governmentality, a new impe-rial power that reaches deeply into human souls. The new subjects of lib-eralism are even more trapped in power because they imagine it as free-dom” (2005, 214).

In spite of obvious empirical problems, such as the diversity of NGOs(Hilhorst 2004), the response to the persuasive Wctions of governmen-tality requires further conceptual work. It is, after all, equally tempting tosee agency and resistance in every instance of governmentality. Followingsuch a procedure would obscure the life-worlds of activists themselves,whose embrace of the neoliberal rhetoric did not make them the indi-viduals that the rhetoric promoted. As is described in chapter 3, the elit-ism that enabled activists to imagine a cleavage between themselves andthe grassroots also fostered a sense of obligations and responsibility intheir own lives, not as rights-bearing individuals, but as providers of wel-fare through the resources that involvement in NGOs and projects wasexpected to provide. Conversely, the room for maneuver among thosewho found themselves in the category of the grassroots was not simplydetermined by the new rhetoric. To assume resistance as a reXection of




power is to misrecognize claims and concerns that owe little to theorganizing assumptions of powerful rhetoric. These considerations, whilecertainly informed by ethnographic observation, can be developedthrough a discussion of two themes that the analytic interest in govern-mentality has tended to overlook. The Wrst is the idea of freedom,whether it has any applicability in contexts in which it appears to havebecome a key instrument of governmentality. The second concerns theinterplay between subject making and objectiWcation, the role of coercionin a mode of governance that appears to assign to the poor the burdensof developing themselves.

Anthropologists have been successful in applying the idea of freedomin their ethnographies of civilizations that can claim no direct link to lib-eralism (see, e.g., Barrett 2004; Fabian 1998; Riesman 1977). A recurrentinsight in these studies has been the recognition that freedom as a poten-tial to transform oneself can be achieved only through social relationships,not in the unproductive state of abstract individuality. It also follows thatfreedom is precarious and discontinuous, very diVerent from the perma-nent condition that neoliberal rhetoric promises. Situational analysis ispertinent here, and, as Badiou (2001, 40) has insisted, the deceit of theabstract subject must give way to explorations of how people become sub-jects under speciWc circumstances. This insistence underlies his impatiencewith those critics who have misunderstood the political implications ofthe theoretical antihumanism that has informed the thought of certainFrench philosophers since the 1960s, including Foucault (Badiou 2001,5–7). Rather than marking a cynical detachment from all political action,this theoretical position has been necessary precisely for a committedengagement in the real of situations. The apparent emphasis on surveil-lance and domination, associated with the early work of Foucault (1977),was something he spent many years undoing (Laidlaw 2002, 322).Foucault’s deepening interest in the “techniques of the self ” was crucialto a sense of freedom that some readings of governmentality have missed(Burchell 1996). The forms of freedom vary according to historical situ-ations, and Foucault’s project was less to prescribe the conditions inwhich freedom is achieved than to investigate how it is exercised (Laidlaw2002, 323; see also Bell 1996). His position diVered from the reduction offreedom to the exercise of choice in singular acts, a procedure that hascharacterized the use of “agency” as an analytic concept. What has beenrecognized by social scientists as agency has too often been determinedby their tacit assumptions of what lies in agents’ true interests (Laidlaw2002, 315).

Whereas Foucault was able to demolish the prison he may have



erected, others continue to reconstruct it as an even more solidconWnement. The debate on governmentality overlaps with that on sov-ereignty, a debate that has the merit of discussing subtle and direct usesof power within the same framework. The maddening capacity of somescholars to argue that black is white (and vice versa) Wnds an illustrationin Giorgio Agamben’s (1998) view that democracy and totalitarianismshare the same foundations in biopolitics, in the value both attach tohuman life in its barest, most abstract form. Every decisive event in onepolitical form, such as winning new liberties in emerging democracies,entails the other, such as the preparation of “a new and more dreadfulfoundation for the very sovereign power from which [people] wanted toliberate themselves” (Agamben 1998, 121). It is certainly possible to iden-tify empirical contexts in which the line between democracy and totali-tarianism risks becoming indistinct.11 Yet a grand theory of sovereignpower can also become another instance of depriving freedom and gov-ernance of any other content than the one given to them by power itself.The prospect is all the more bleak when the new politics that the theoryis said to require remains, in Agamben’s words, “largely to be invented”(1998, 11). ObjectiWcation and becoming a subject are, more often thannot, simultaneous processes that need not be consigned to the sinistershadows of incipient totalitarianism.

According to John ComaroV’s critique of the colonial state as a topicof Foucauldian reXections, for example, fault is to be found with the habitof regarding the colonial state as a uniform phenomenon. His chargeagainst governmentality is the way in which the idea can contribute to thisreiWcation, to a false concreteness of what he considers to be “historicallyXuid forms and processes” (ComaroV 2002, 121). SpeciWcally, Foucauldiannarratives give short shrift to the limits of self-regulation in the contextsof abuse and unfulWlled promises. The very process of eliciting consentmay also produce new vocabularies of riposte and unforeseen practices ofsubversion. The distinction between rights-bearing citizens and custom-oriented subjects may have been instrumental to colonial rule—and itmay have limited subjects’ scope for revolt (Mamdani 1996)—but theemerging disputes could also be about citizenship tout court. In the con-temporary situation of human rights in Malawi, human rights activists arethe ones who have the greatest diYculty in seeing beyond the Wctions ofneoliberal governance. Yet there is no inexorable condition of govern-mentality awaiting ethnographic description. Rather, inexorability wouldbe all there is without ethnographic description.

Lest another set of abstract notions emerges to push the analysis to ever




more postmodern heights of indeterminate power, the historical conti-nuities alluded to above must be kept in mind. If in colonial Africa, asMegan Vaughan has argued, “group classiWcation was a far more impor-tant construction than individualization” (1991, 11), postcolonial MalawioVers an example of how the two were connected. The new human rightsdiscourse individualized claimants by recourse to old Wxations with groupmembership. “Communities” took the form of individuals when donorsand activists asked them to provide for their own development (chapters3 and 4). Persons seeking legal aid were made to believe that their griev-ances were particular, while, in practice, activists treated claimants asgeneric representatives of ignorant masses (chapters 5 and 6). The rheto-ric appeared distinct enough from the paternalism of the previous regimeto eVect a certain amnesia. Community development, after all, had a muchlonger history in the governance of African countries than what theexhortations of participation suggested (Hickey and Mohan 2005, 239–240). At the same time, the emphasis on individual freedoms ensured thatold images of tribal communities no longer applied. ObjectiWed as “thegrassroots” in human rights advocacy, communities were taught to con-sider themselves as nationals who shared political citizenship.12

As an example of how self-regulation is not far removed from the prac-tices of objectiWcation, consider a recent ethnography of a secondaryschool in postcolonial Zambia (Simpson 2003). Teachings and theschool’s oYcial association with a certain type of Christianity may nothave been contested onstage when teachers were present, but they becameelements in a complex process of identity formation, with students simul-taneously drawing on and reworking the religious, gendered, and racial-ized discourses that their education presented to them. Much as theirworld-views may not have been exactly what their school as an institutionof surveillance might have led their teachers to expect, the students, as anelite-in-the-making, did learn to regard their position in society in speciWcways. It was a position that relegated their less-educated kin and compa-triots to the status of “dirty villagers” (Simpson 2003, 121–122). Whilelearning to consider themselves as sophisticated gentlemen, the studentscame to embrace a long tradition of objectifying others.

Similar “techniques of the self,” deriving from missionary education,can be seen to have produced Malawian human rights activists’ image ofthemselves as clean, assured, and civilized subjects. The potential for coali-tions with the impoverished recipients of their advocacy was evident onlyoccasionally. When activists in some NGOs appealed to human rights intheir critique of a manipulative regime, many Malawians rejoiced. Yet




contested as they may have seemed, only some human rights were rec-ognized for public debate by activists and authorities alike, while otherswere silenced. Popular frustrations loomed large when it became appar-ent that protests remained conWned to particular liberties, far removedfrom the everyday concerns of impoverishment and exploitation. Thedeafness of activists and authorities became particularly acute when pop-ular concerns and claims were expressed in ways that refused the natu-ralism of individual freedoms.

Who Were the Prisoners?Those whose imagination was imprisoned by the idea of individual free-doms did not share the same identity or subjectivity. The view of gover-nance that emerges in this study emphasizes not only its transnationalcharacter but also its sources in an uncanny alliance between agents andagencies that would seem to have little in common. It is precisely becausetheir interests were divergent that a conspiracy can be ruled out. Rather,the diverse interests were locked in a mutually beneWcial dispute, althoughthis dispute excluded the vast majority of Malawians whose interests werenot served by the particular hierarchy of rights on which the dispute wasbased. As is argued throughout this book, Malawi’s political historymakes this situation of human rights understandable. Human rightsactivists, from an acquiescent project of civic education to a vociferousNGO, were particularly concerned about political and civil liberties,precisely the kinds of rights that aYrmed their own identity as the har-bingers of a new order. They were supported by an independent pressthat, while contracting after the Wrst years of multiparty democracy, wasadmirably forthright in exposing ruling politicians’ self-serving tactics.13

Paradoxically, however, these interventions maintained the discoursethat self-styled democrats were most comfortable with—a discourse onpolitical and civil liberties. On numerous occasions during the Wrstdecade of multiparty democracy, the ruling UDF retorted that it hadplayed a leading role in dismantling Banda’s autocracy and continued toprotect Malawians’ “hard-won freedoms.” A common strategy for leadingpoliticians was to turn the tables by highlighting activists’ dependence onexternal donors. Cycles of dispute thereby followed, with little scope foran expansion of the terms of those disputes.14

Such was the impact of political history that alternative imaginingswere not readily available to intellectuals and politicians. Malawi’s post-




colonial era had been remarkable in the region for its complete exclusionfrom socialist experiments. Whereas Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia,and Zimbabwe adopted various aspects of socialist ideologies, Malawiansharboring them could operate only in exile during Banda’s regime andhad little impact on the developments in the country. On the otherhand, the facility with which the neighboring countries were able to dis-card socialist ideologies during the 1990s was matched by former exiles’enthusiasm for individual freedoms. Chapters 5 and 6 describe how anNGO they founded had an agenda that was compatible with neoliberalreforms. The few NGOs that had economic issues in their focus, notablythe Economics Association of Malawi and the Malawi Economic JusticeNetwork, were as averse to Weld-based collaboration and advocacy ashuman rights NGOs were. Their agenda was to oVer professional econ-omists’ independent analysis of the national budget and macroeconomicissues, patently valuable service but not designed to mobilize the poor.

Crucial to this situation of human rights were the expatriate repre-sentatives of donor agencies, the most obvious embodiments of transna-tional governance in Malawi. As elsewhere in the postcolonial world, for-eign nationals working as expatriates did not normally oVer theiropinions for public scrutiny. An exception was foreign diplomats, whoseviews on Malawi’s developments were sought by the press and eagerlydiscussed by many Malawians. Donors preferred to represent themselvesas “partners” and often employed Malawians as deputies in their countryoYces, available to act as the public faces of these agencies. As willbecome clear in the subsequent chapters, by funding projects and NGOsthat focused on political and civil liberties and by ignoring the eVects ofother kinds of interventions, such as legal aid, donor agencies were com-plicit in maintaining the status quo. The European Union–funded proj-ect on civic education, with its incomparably extensive reach andresources, was an example of a quite deliberate silencing of those inter-ests that might have revealed the threat that a diVerent sense of humanrights posed to neoliberalism.

Like human rights activists, expatriate oYcials may have begun withgenuine intentions to transform Malawi’s structural inequalities. Just asactivists were embedded in particular circumstances that blinded them tothe limited relevance of their own interests, so too were most expatriatespredisposed to live highly circumscribed lives in Malawi. Working fordonor agencies, they typically lived in the aZuent parts of urban areas,mixing with other expatriates during their spare time, surrounded bydomestic servants, often the only Malawians with whom they were able




to establish some measure of familiarity during their stints in the coun-try (see also chapter 5). A relation between a servant and a master, orbetween a maid and a madam, was a poor substitute for lived experienceamong the impoverished majority, never compensated by “Weld trips” inwhich donors’ lack of language skills became especially apparent. Itremains rare to Wnd an expatriate who has made an eVort to learn thenational language of Malawi, let alone its other indigenous languages.The most frequent excuse I have heard is that expatriates see no reason tolearn a language that they will never need outside Malawi. This book laysbare some of the consequences of this attitude.

All the prisoners of freedom mentioned above—and the organizationsthat are in the empirical focus of this book—are primarily secular in ori-entation. This focus can be seen to introduce a bias to the study, given thatChristian organizations played a major role in Malawi’s democratization.The majority of Malawians are Christians, and Islam as the second largestfaith commands a following of about 12 percent of the population. Asmentioned in the introduction, the new era in Malawi is commonly seento have dawned with the Lenten Letter of the country’s Catholic bishopsin 1992 (see, e.g., Newell 1995). Churches remained vocal critics of rulingpoliticians in “democratic” Malawi, and both Presbyterian and Catholicclergy, representing the leading mainstream denominations, issued acontinuous Xow of critical “pastoral letters” during the decade after thetransition (see Englund 2000; Ott 2000; Ross 2004). While individualreligious leaders were susceptible to political patronage throughout theMuluzi era, churches as institutions were remarkably consistent as watch-dogs of democracy and, if anything, grew more united as the cynicism ofthe regime became more apparent. The contrast with Zimbabwe, wherecivil society also found leadership in Christian churches, is illuminating(see Dorman 2002, 2003). DiVerent Christian organizations, even withinthe Catholic community, came to swear allegiance to diVerent initiativesduring the run-up to the constitutional referendum in 2000, making thevoice of Christian churches less clear in Zimbabwean public life than itwas in Malawi.15

A good example of churches’ activism in Malawi was the oppositionto the UDF’s attempts to remove the limits on the number of terms thatthe state president could stay in oYce. The introduction pointed out thefearless activism in which several organizations, both secular and reli-gious, participated during 2001–2. With Muluzi banning all publicdemonstrations on the issue and the UDF appearing at times as formi-dable as Banda’s MCP before the transition,16 the churches from main-




stream to many charismatic denominations oVered an unrivaled infra-structure of dissent and courage. Indeed, such is their role as watchdogsof democracy in Malawi that Kenneth Ross sees them holding almost “amonopoly of civil society activism” (2004, 105). His concern is whetherthis indicates a failure in the development of Malawi’s civil society.

Ross’s concern may seem unfounded if it is observed that a network ofabout forty human rights, women’s, youth, church, and media organiza-tions constituted Malawi’s Human Rights Consultative Committee in2002. Moreover, the evidence in this book on secular organizationsshows that they are by no means inconsequential agents in Malawi’s civilsociety. Perhaps a more crucial concern is whether church activism carriesany prospects for a wider set of issues to be addressed in human rights dis-course. Ross (2004, 104) is hopeful, reporting that the silence of thechurches on economic issues during the early years of multiparty democ-racy has changed into a greater awareness among the clergy. Yet at thelevel of public statements—from “pastoral letters” to press releases—there is nothing new in the churches’ comments on the exploitation ofMalawians. The Catholic bishops’ letter in 1992 already lamented thegrowing gap between the rich and the poor. More signiWcant is thechurches’ virtual incapability to launch concrete programs and cam-paigns to debate and revise neoliberal economic policies. Interventions onthis front have been haphazard and localized, ranging from microcreditschemes, in line with the neoliberal insistence on self-empowerment, tomore radical attempts to institute economic and social justice, such as theinitiative of expatriate priests in a tobacco-growing area to organize ten-ants into a union (Englund 2000, 588–589). The economic situation ofthe local clergy themselves has hardly improved over the years, keepingtheir concerns focused on personal survival and security (see VonDoepp2002).

Muluzi’s blatant abuse of personal and public resources for buyingsupport did direct church leaders’ attention to his management of theeconomy. They were not alone, however, in condemning his handouts,and popular reXections on the issue extended from mere moral consid-erations, as expressed by the clergy, to concrete suggestions of properpolicies. Time and again, I was told by both urban and rural poor inMalawi that Muluzi’s gifts were much less desirable than economic poli-cies that would have beneWted the nation as a whole. People frequentlyarrived at innovative calculations of how many millions of kwacha Muluzihad spent on gifts and patronage during a given week and the extent towhich those millions could have decreased the price of fertilizer in the




country. The removal of subsidies on agricultural inputs after the demo-cratic transition had come as a shock to ordinary Malawians, most ofwhom, whether in town or in village (Englund 2002d), depended on cul-tivation for their food security. The clergy’s preoccupation with civil andpolitical liberties failed to bring the question of livelihoods to the publicarena that they had helped to expand since autocratic rule. WhileMalawians remained as resolutely Christian as ever, mainstream denom-inations may have seen a certain alienation between the top clergy and thelaity, with the spiritual security oVered in Pentecostal and charismaticchurches attracting new adherents (see Englund 2000, 2001b, 2003,2004a).

These developments in Malawi’s popular Christianity indicate yetanother challenge to a human rights discourse that puts an emphasis onindividual freedoms. Prisoners of freedom are unlikely to accept dis-courses on debt, obligation, and entitlement within the realm of the con-ceivable in this situation of human rights, even when some of these alter-natives are voiced in Christian idioms that they otherwise cherish. Thesituation of human rights delineates a sphere of governance in which pub-lic debate has to conform to predetermined standards of what is worthsaying. Yet to stop the analysis there is to give the last word to power.How freedom can retain any actual meaning, in the lives of both humanrights activists and the impoverished majority, is a puzzle that must notdisappear into the fury of critique.




Documents

Prisoners of Freedom - Sample Chapter